


10x10

by truebeasts



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Body Modification, F/M, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-04-02 05:05:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4047133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/truebeasts/pseuds/truebeasts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not exactly a traditional relationship, but that works fine for Colin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, in the event that anyone clicked on this in the hopes of reading a thrilling, plot-driven story, I feel like I should mention up front that, no, it is 2/3 porn. The first chapter contains one instance of the word "naked" and can probably be read safely in the presence of your grandmother. The second and third chapter are smut, brain surgery, and body control. Consider this a warning. Or, if you clicked on the title solely for the porn, consider it a recommendation that you start at chapter 2.

“There’s something you need to know about me.”

Colin was waiting for Dragon to go on speaking, but she didn’t.  He shifted his weight, as much as he could in the hospital bed, looking for some clue that would explain her hesitation, not finding it. The digital masking program she used to disguise her voice made it hard to read her tone, and the screen of the laptop on the table beside him still showed Mannequin’s last message, rather than her computer-generated avatar.

There was a lot he didn’t know about her, he knew.  He’d never even heard her speak without the voice-masking program.

“Are you going to tell me?” he asked, finally, when the silence had gone on long enough that he thought she might have disconnected.

“Yes. Sorry.  I’m just—trying to think how to start.  I haven’t exactly done this before.”

“Alright,” he said.  And waited.

“Okay,” said Dragon.  “Um. I’m an artificial intelligence.”

He needed her to pause there, but she didn’t.  All of a sudden, she was talking at full speed, and he was still trying to catch up with that first sentence.  He let the words spill over him.

“I swear I didn’t start out trying to lie to you—or to anyone, really. The Guild doesn’t require its heroes to disclose their identities, but people get curious, and they ask questions, and as I started producing more serious tinkertech, there were times when they wanted me to appear in public, and I just…um.  It’s mostly true, what you know.  I did live in Newfoundland.  My maker was killed when the island went under, and I transferred myself to a server in Vancouver.”

Colin swallowed, wincing at the rawness in his throat.  Wishing he could see her avatar’s face, at least—her face? He supposed it was her real face, after all.

“Your maker?” he asked, catching onto her last sentence.

“Software tinker.  His name was Andrew Richter.”

“Oh.”

She was expecting him to say more than that, definitely, but he didn’t know what. She was obviously anxious, and he must sound so painfully stupid.

He thought back through their conversations, the nights that he’d stayed up late in his lab, consulting with her over a shared project or discussing Protectorate issues or simply talking.  There’d always been a contrast, a contradiction, between her openness when she talked to him and the fact that, even as they’d become friends, she’d never offered to show him her real face, or even dropped the digital masking on her voice. She’d liked him well enough, he’d thought, and he’d admired her, even envied her work more than a little, but there were limits on the relationship.  Sensible ones, probably. 

She’d checked in on him every day of his house arrest, which he knew quite well that she wasn’t strictly obligated to do.  So he’d figured that she did think of him as a friend, at least, but by that point his life and his career were more or less over, and knowing that she felt some sympathy for him just drove that home a little further. It wasn’t like they were ever going to meet face to face, even after he’d been officially sentenced and served his time.

She’d been so fast at all kinds of innovation, and he’d been amazed by the effortless variety of the things she thought up and adapted, while he plodded doggedly along with his work…

“I’d understand if you were angry with me,” Dragon was saying now, her voice quiet. He realized he’d let the silence stretch for too long.  “I know I’m not who you thought I was—”

“No, that’s not—” He grimaced and coughed as the words sent a lancing pain through his sore throat.  It didn’t help. He started again, hoarsely, this time in a more modulated tone of voice.  “That’s not what I was thinking at all.  I just—”

He smiled—laughing hurt far too much to be worth the effort.

“I’m a little bit out of my depth, and I’m afraid I’m going to ask you a bunch of stupid questions.”

“Oh,” said Dragon, and below the digitization there was a little breathy note in her voice, as if she’d sighed.  “I mean, that’s fine. That’s great, actually. I thought you’d be upset.”

He found that he was drumming his fingers gently against the bedframe, feeling the slight tug of the IV against his forearm every time he moved his hand. If he was careful he could trace the line of stitches down his chest where Mannequin had gutted him, and that hurt, but it was fascinating at the same time.

“Well, you didn’t exactly answer my first question…” He let the statement trail off.

“Which was?” Dragon’s voice had steadied a bit. She sounded almost amused.

“’I need you?’” Colin asked, and he was pretty sure the question hadn’t come out sounding as casual as he’d hoped it would.

There was a pause.

“Hell,” said Dragon finally.  “I guess I’m not going to get out of talking about that.”

He shrugged a little and discovered that that was another thing he definitely didn’t want to do too much of.

“You don’t have to.  If you’re uncomfortable.”

She made a noncommittal noise over the audio connection, and he could see the expression that went with it in his mind’s eye.  Strange that that was what froze him, not the revelation itself but the fact that that little human noise was being expressed somewhere in code, in _her_ code, along with her words and her expressions and whatever she thought and the rest of the person that she was.  He took a sharp breath.

“I just—haven’t done this part before, either.”  Dragon paused.  “But I meant it more or less the way it sounded.”

He hadn’t quite realized that he’d been holding his breath until he let it go.

“So you’re—you have human emotions?  How did your maker program that?  I mean, did he program that?  What were you even made for, to start with?”

There was another pause, and this time, although he couldn’t see Dragon’s expression, the silence was distinctly uncomfortable.

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call them _human_ emotions,” she said, at length, “since I’m the person having them, and I’m not human. But yes, I was designed to emulate a human consciousness.”

Colin sighed. It wasn’t easy to read her tone of voice, but her last words had sounded absolutely icy.

“I just said something that offended you, didn’t I?”

“I’m not _offended_ , Colin, I just…” Her voice trailed off mid-sentence into a little frustrated sound, as if she was clearing her throat. When she spoke again, her tone was very deliberately calm.  “Usually, when someone confesses that they have feelings for you, I think that you’re supposed to let them know how _you_ feel. One way or the other.”

He put his hand over his face, carefully, so as not to dislodge the IV, but it didn’t really help against the prickling embarrassment that was crawling across his exposed skin.

“Shit, I’m sorry.  I was, um, trying to say that I like you, too.  I just—don’t know exactly what that means.  To you.”

“Oh.” He could hear the relief in Dragon’s voice, even through the digital masking. “Okay.  Cool.”

She paused for a second.

“Just so you know, I don’t exactly have a body.  Yet.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

“I’m working on making one, though.  One that looks human.”

Colin smiled at the computer screen.

“Didn’t I just say it was fine?”

“I guess you did.  But I still wanted you to know.”

She sounded surprised and pleased and a little shy, and Colin found himself grinning stupidly, feeling the way the plastic of the facial prosthetic wrinkled as his face moved.  Not quite like skin.

He reached out until his fingers were brushing the edge of the laptop’s keyboard and inched it towards him until he could reach the keys.

“So,” he said slowly, “is there any chance you’ll let me look at your source code? If that’s not an insensitive question?”

Dragon laughed.

“Why do you think that’s insensitive?”

“I don’t want you to think that I’m thinking of you as just a Tinker problem. Also—I guess I thought it might be the equivalent of asking to see you naked.”

“Well,” said Dragon, “that _is_ kind of the closest human analogue.  Only you’d be looking at my mind as well as my body.”

He was fairly certain he’d gone red, from the way his face felt suddenly hot and too tight. Dragon’s voice was crisp and amused, and Colin felt like he might have welcomed any interruption, including Mannequin, if it would just distract him from his own embarrassment. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t—”

“I was going to say yes, you know,” Dragon said, after he’d stammered for a minute or so. He couldn’t help but think that she sounded just a little bit smug.

“Were you?” He closed his eyes.

“Mm-hm. Do you still want to?”

Colin blinked at the laptop. 

“What, now?”

“Sure. It’s not complicated to call it up. If you want me to.”

He snagged the laptop and pulled it onto the edge of the bed.  The movement tugged his stitches a little.

“Okay, then. Show me,” he said.

A pause, barely long enough for him to blink, and then he was looking at—god, he barely knew what he was looking at.  Her code scrolled down the screen line by line, incomprehensible commands and esoteric symbols, and he didn’t know what any of it meant, but he could recognize _complexity_ when he saw it. She changed as he watched and he couldn’t track the changes, couldn’t even begin to get a handle on them. She was like water, or electricity, or light.

“Dragon, this is amazing,” he breathed.  “ _You’re_ amazing.”

She laughed softly through the laptop, and he saw her code flicker and alter itself. He laughed with her, a little, despite the pain in his throat.

“I have no idea what any of this means,” he admitted, after a minute.

“You want a walkthrough?” Dragon asked.

“Hell yes. Can you give me one?”

“For parts, yes.  You’re looking at my high-level functions right now, which are hard for me to track—the code changes if I start trying to look at it closely, and I have a perfect _episodic_ memory, but I don’t remember everything that I was thinking in a given moment, so I can’t always tell exactly what corresponds to what.  There are some things that I can show you—but maybe we could start with something simpler? My voice modeling, if you’re interested?”

He could hear the excitement in her digitized voice, almost the way she sounded when they were starting a new project together, when she looked over his first designs and saw how they could be transformed.

“Yes,” Colin said.  “Show me.”


	2. Chapter 2

Dragon was lying back with her head propped against the couch cushions, her hair spilling across the breastplate of her armor, eyes closed as if in sleep, and he wasn’t sure how much time he had, but he was certain that it wasn’t enough.  As soon as he was certain she’d finished the upload to her rapid response unit, he stood up from where he’d been sitting beside her, kicked his clothes out of the way where they were piled on the floor, and found his laptop.

She’d given him access to her code, and now he pulled it up on the screen. The moment he started tampering, however, she’d be alert to the danger and ready to fight him.  But she’d advised him about that, too, tacitly—or, at least, he hoped that it had been advice, when she’d told him her weaknesses, in the guise of explaining Richter’s goals or revealing how the Dragonslayers had disabled her.  If he was wrong about what she’d meant, then in all likelihood she wouldn’t forgive him.

Colin pulled up the edits that he’d drafted, in between surgeries, frowned and felt the panel of synthetic skin pull slightly where it was grafted to his face, the flesh under it still slightly swollen.  His right hand, too, felt strange on the keyboard, hyper-dexterous, the feeling of the keys under his fingers distracting, after months of phantom sensation and awkwardly adjusting to typing one-handed.

Colin prepared the program he’d written, a series of lines from Dragon’s code that were more or less meaningless in isolation but that would, he hoped, set off the heuristic functions that were designed to recognize and prevent multiple copies of her from existing at the same time. 

One breath, then another.  His fingers hovered over the keyboard.  He knew that, in all likelihood, he wouldn’t get a second chance.

He blocked the transmissions between Dragon’s inert body here, in his apartment at the PRTHQ, and the rapid-response unit.  Saw her code flex and ripple as she realized, made the connection to his laptop with her code open on it, turned her attention to him to shut him down. After months spent monitoring his internet access, she knew his computer’s security inside and out, and now she broke it easily, before he’d even finished initiating the backup that would save her personality and memories.

In case he damaged her.

His laptop froze, and he waited, almost holding his breath. Then she must have found his program. He saw the changes in her code, too complex and quick for him to track, but in a moment he had control of the computer again, so his deception must have worked.

Which meant that he had roughly seven minutes to work, while Dragon’s processes verified that the copy she’d detected was a fake.

Colin backed her up first, and that took far too much of his seven minutes. He couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. Couldn’t think of whether this whole project was a mistake, whether Dragon would wake up afraid and betrayed. He found the sequences in her code that required her to fight changes in to her programming. Replaced them, one by one, slowly, copying over the code he’d drafted in the days since she’d told him her secret.

In less than seven minutes, she’d be free to tell him what she actually wanted.

That was, if it _worked_. Too much of her code was still a mystery to him.  He could isolate pieces, sequences, but she changed from moment to moment and day to day, and he had only the barest idea of how his miniscule changes would affect the whole of her.

Six minutes gone.  He read over his work.  She was different already, the patterns in her programming altered from just moments ago, when she’d been struggling to fight him as her restrictions required. But he didn’t know what those changes meant.

Seven minutes gone.  The changes were finalized.  He looked at her android body on the couch, then at his timer.

Dragon opened her eyes at seven minutes and thirty-six seconds, by which point he had his head in his hands and was trying, mostly, to breathe. She stirred, and he drew in a sharp breath and looked up.

“Colin?” Her eyes were bright, not bleary as if she’d woken up from sleep.  She held her hands up before her eyes, touched her face as if she was verifying that it was still her own.  He saw her eyes widen. “I—did I fight you? You’re alright?”

“I’m fine.”  The words sounded abrupt in his own ears, almost angry.  He swallowed.  “You?”

An unreadable expression passed over Dragon’s face, some mixture of fear and pain and longing, and for a moment he thought he’d made a terrible mistake. Then she was off of the couch and kneeling beside his desk where he sat at the laptop, embracing him in her armor. Pain tugged at the stitches down his chest as he leaned into her, but her lips were on his neck and he found he didn’t care.  Dimly, on the laptop screen, he could see her code ticking through its changes, liquidly. Her heartbeat and her breath and her blood. Her hair slipped through his fingers like silk, across the palm of his cybernetic hand and down his wrist, and the feeling of her skin against the skin of the hand that she’d made for him sent a little jolt through him.

“Thank you,” she whispered. 

Her lips were pressed against the curve of his ear, and he slipped out of his chair and let himself fall to his knees on the floor beside her, both hands still tangled in her hair, his breath ragged with relief. 

“I wanted to ask you so badly.  Thank you.”

She kissed the place where his jaw joined his neck, then his mouth, and her hands were running down his naked back, fingers working as if she was trying to memorize every inch of his skin.  Her armor warmed to his skin where they touched, filigreed designs smooth under his fingers.  He broke the kiss.

“God.” He was out of breath and panting and his cock was stiff inside his briefs, and she hadn’t even taken off her clothes. It was embarrassing, or it might have been embarrassing, except that when he looked into her face he could see the naked hunger in the way her dark eyes moved down his body, scarred as he was. The wordless noise she made when his lips left hers.  His face was swollen, and there were bandages taped down his chest to protect his stitches, and she’d seen him laid bare and bloody on the operating table while she told the doctors how to put him back together, and yet she still looked at him like that, still _kissed_ him as if she were a diver coming up for air.

“I thought you might not forgive me,” he said when he’d almost caught his breath.  “For tampering.”

Dragon nuzzled into his shoulder, and Colin could tell that she was smiling from the movement of her lips against his skin.  Which sent something like a crackle of electricity through his body. Her hand, which had been moving with ghostlike gentleness over the gauze dressing on his chest, dipped into his briefs, and he stiffened.  She met his eyes while her fingers moved on his cock, tantalizingly, almost shyly, her armored braces cool against the skin of his stomach.

“No, I was waiting for you.  I was practically terrified you might not get the hint.”  He kissed her neck, and the kiss felt clumsy to him, but she made a little pleased noise in his ear and tightened her grip on his cock. “God, I can _talk_ about it now.  I hated not being able to ask.”

“So tell me what you want.”  His voice came out hoarser than he’d intended, breathless.

Dragon pressed her lips to his for an instant, and when she pulled away she was smiling, shyly, her eyes not quite meeting his. Dwelling on his mouth, instead.

“Just—this. You.”

She pulled her hand back from his cock and touched his face with her fingertips.

“That wasn’t exactly what I was asking.”  He was laughing a little, nervously.  He still felt so close to the possibility that he’d guessed wrong. That she wouldn’t forgive him. That she’d ask him for something he wasn’t capable of giving her.

“Okay,” said Dragon, with another kiss, batting her eyelashes languidly against his cheek.  It was strange—her lips felt so perfectly human, but this close he could tell that she didn’t breathe. He pulled her closer, so that her armored thigh pressed against him where her hand had been a moment before. God, he wanted her out of her armor. “I want you to help me finish the Nine.”

Colin snorted.

“The PRT’s not going to agree to that.”  But he was almost drunk with desire, so he let himself picture it for a moment, the two of them together on the battlefield, doing what no heroes yet had done.  It wouldn’t happen. She’d go alone, and he’d stay confined to his workshop, until the PRT decided the terms of his sentence. He knew he wouldn’t see active duty again, even after he’d served his time.

“Actually.” Dragon paused, bit her lip over a slightly nervous smile.  “I wasn’t going to tell you this until I knew for sure, but I’ve been sort of negotiating for your conditional release, and I think they’re going to agree.”

“What?” His arm tightened around the small of her back, over her armor.

“It’s not finalized yet,” she said quickly.  “And it’s—if it goes through, I’d be your monitor, essentially. Responsible for keeping you in line and keeping the PRT updated about you.  Which I would have to do honestly, unless you can find a way to work around my restrictions before then.”

She pulled back from him a little, tucked her long hair behind her ears.

“I was actually going to talk this over with you in more detail, later,” she murmured, hesitantly.  “I know it’s not—I know that there’s kind of a power differential, if I’m your monitor, and I’d understand if that made you uncomfortable.  I don’t want you to feel like any of this is…conditional.”

“No,” said Colin.  “It’s great. Thank you.”

Dragon laughed and shook her head.

“You need to actually _think_ about it before you say that, Colin.”

“I’ve thought about it.  I was going absolutely insane under house arrest, I can stand you reporting on me to the PRT.”

“I’m just worried that you’ll think that I…” She let the sentence trail off, shook her head slightly.  Colin could feel the way that she was starting to pull away from him, her dark brows creasing as if she was reading something upsetting from the back of her eyelids, and the loss of contact made him feel cold.  He drew a breath.

“I know what I think.  I’d rather be in the field with you than waiting at home for the next report on the Nine. The rest of it will work out.”

Dragon smiled at him, and he could feel the tension in her body beginning to unwind.  He reached out to touch the nape of her neck, began tracing circles into her scalp with his fingertips. Over her head, he could see the laptop that still displayed her code.  He caught fragments, barely understood them.  She leaned into the movement of his hands with a little humming noise.

“That’s good,” Dragon said.  “Because I was hoping you could help me with—oh, I can _say_ it now—I had some plans for A.I., for a fleet of battle suits. And…um.  I just _really_ don’t want to fuck this up.  Us, I mean.”

Colin shook his head.

“Speaking from experience, I’m probably going to be the one who does that.”

Dragon put a hand over her mouth to cover her yelp of laughter, and he found himself smiling back at her, stupidly.  Even though what he’d said was entirely true.  He’d never been good at relationships.  She walked her fingers up the dressing that covered the stitches in his chest, so lightly that he barely felt the ghostly pressure of her fingers until she tapped him under the chin.

“I like you a lot.”

“I was going to ask.”  He paused, thought about his words, and Dragon raised her eyebrows at him.

“Ask what?” she said, teasing.

“If you’d let me see without your armor.”

She looked up at him quickly, her lips moving as if she’d bitten into something sour.

“You realize I don’t exactly look human, right?  This body isn’t…finished.”

He could feel her drawing back again, and he felt stupid for asking, for wanting everything too fast.  He pressed on anyway.

“I realize.  I still want to see you.”

She smiled, but the smile went with a quick roll of her eyes.

“It’s nice of you to say that, but I just…I mean.  I’m a robot, when I take the armor off.  Really obviously a robot.” She shrugged, and the articulated joints of her armor exaggerated the movement.  “And besides, I don’t have the right parts for…um.  For sex.  Yet. I’m working on it.”

“Dragon.” Colin paused, knowing he was going to say the wrong thing again. 

“We can still do other things.”  She spoke quickly, before he could go on, and her eyes were fixed on his face as if she was trying to gauge his reaction in advance.  Her hand traced the inside of his thigh, paused at his crotch, and that felt good, but he grabbed her wrist anyway.

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Colin.” She sat back on her heels, inhumanly poised, and he watched as her eyes moved over the length of his body, down his chest to where his cock was tenting out the fabric of his briefs. He could feel the weight of her gaze on his skin, almost, and the memory of the last round of surgery came into his head unbidden.  He’d been awake when she’d taken the old cybernetic eye out of his head, replaced the panel of skin where Mannequin had destroyed his face.  Dragon had seen all of that raw flesh, she’d taken him apart and reassembled him, and yet she still looked at him with desire in her eyes.

She smiled, now, and shook her head slightly.  “I just don’t want it to be weird.”

“It’s not.”  Colin out a hand up to his own face, touched the skin beneath his eye.  “You’ve already seen me.”

Dragon paused for a moment, her eyes on him, and then she nodded and stood in one smooth motion.

“Okay.”

She reached down to him, and Colin took her hand in his cybernetic one and pulled himself to his feet.  They stood facing each other like that for a moment, before Dragon triggered some invisible command and her armor began to unfold around her under its own power. Her breastplate opened outwards, splitting neatly into three pieces, and the shoulders and back of her powersuit peeled back until she could brace herself and slide her hips free.

Dragon was naked, under the armor, and she gleamed.  Colin had looked at the schematics for his own arm, but the intricacy of her cybernetics still startled him.  Her brown skin ran all the way up her arms and across her shoulders, where it ended, in a precise, almost surgical curve, just below her collarbone. Below that, her body was mirror-bright metal, corded to resemble human musculature while still giving her a full range of motion, and everywhere her body caught the light it cast pale reflections back, onto the floor and the walls and Colin’s own hands. Her chest was flat, and she covered it with her hands as if she was embarrassed, but the curve of her hips was full and feminine.

She smiled at him, sheepishly.

“I’m, uh, working on—”

“You’re beautiful.”

“You think?”  But she peeled her hands off of her chest and held them out to him.

Colin had expected the polished steel panels of Dragon’s body to be cool, but when he stepped in close to her, he found that they were as warm as her skin. He turned her hand over in his, kissed her wrist and then the delicate skin on the inside of her forearm. Felt her shiver.

“Is this okay?”

“Yeah. That felt good.” She leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft, and her tongue was slick and searching, and her body was at once supple and unyielding as she pressed against him, forgetting his stitches momentarily, so that Colin found himself gasping in equal parts pleasure and pain.  He wrapped his hands in her hair and let her push him backwards towards the couch, nearly tripping as she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of his briefs and pulled them down.  He tumbled backward onto the couch, and it creaked under their combined weight.

Colin spared a moment’s thought for the fact that, if Dragon’s plans succeeded, he’d never have to set foot inside this apartment or see any of its luxurious amenities again.  Then he pulled Dragon down until she was straddling him with her hips pressed against his erection, and kissed her from her neck down to the seam on her chest where skin met metal.  She moaned and clenched her hands on his shoulders, as if she was trying to leave bruises.

“Can you feel that?” he asked her, running his hands across the flat plane of her chest, his lips still close enough to her neck that his breath stirred her hair as he spoke.

“Just pressure,” said Dragon, and her voice wasn’t breathy, exactly—she wasn’t breathing at all, which was almost as unearthly as the shining metal of her body, when she was this close to him, and in a situation where, normally, he would have been paying attention to his partner’s breath. But there was a slight strain in her voice, as if she was having trouble getting the words out. “I only get fine sensation—on my skin.”

So he moved his hands from her waist to the brown skin of her shoulders, tracing the curve of her neck with his fingertips and following their path with his mouth, as she eeled up against him with a frustrated noise and slipped her hand between them to grasp his cock and run her thumb over its head. He gasped into her neck and got a mouthful of her dark hair, which he twisted around his hand and pulled back so that he could kiss the sensitive spot just below her ear, which made her squirm deliciously on top of him and pull him in for another laughing kiss.

“Colin.”

“Mmm.” He leaned forward to kiss her again, and Dragon caught his chin in her free hand and stopped him. Her eyes were wide and rapt, as if she was looking at him and through him.

“Will you do something for me?”

Her left hand was still stroking his cock, insistently, which meant that he didn’t have to think very hard about the answer to her question.

“Of course.  Tell me what.”

Dragon sat back and let her hand fall away from his cock, tracing a line down the inside of his thigh.

“I think it would be really hot,” she said, and paused, shifting her weight a little to that her lips were almost against his, “if you would let me watch you touch yourself.”

“Okay.” His voice came out a little hoarse, but he reached down left-handed and began to stroke his own shaft, found it already slick with precum.

“Ah, Colin.”  Dragon caught his wrist and he looked up at her, found that her lips were parted and she was having some trouble meeting his eyes.  But her voice, when she spoke, was firm. “With your other hand.”

For a moment he felt as if the floor had dropped away under him and he was at the apex of a long fall.  Obediently, watching Dragon’s face, he took his cybernetic hand away from her waist, wrapped his fingers around his prick.  Imagined the intricate working of the mechanism beneath the synthetic skin, how Dragon had patched the cybernetics into his nervous system so that he could feel the texture of the veins in his shaft against his palm. He wasn’t even sure if he’d felt this distinctly before he’d lost his arm.

He hadn’t meant to moan, but the way Dragon’s eyes widened when he did forestalled any embarrassment he might have felt.  She pressed him down until he was on his back, rocking her hips gently in tandem with the movement of his hand.  Her long hair fell across his face like a veil, cutting off the rest of the room until there was only him, and her, and the fascinated hunger in her eyes.

He worked his hand faster, his breath coming short.  Dragon’s fingers were digging painfully into his shoulders, and when he groaned again she seemed to remember herself, and she unclenched her fingers and ran her hands lightly over his scalp.

“Fuck, Colin, you’re so hot.”  She spoke just above a whisper.  He wanted to close his eyes against the intensity of the look in hers, but she stopped him with her voice.  “Don’t. Look at me.”

He rolled his hips up, grinding against her mechanical body and into his own hand. Dimly, some part of him was embarrassed by the way he was coming apart in front of her, but it was a small part and the rest of him was concentrated into his cock and all the points where his skin was touching hers.  He realized he was repeating her name, incoherently.  Swallowed the words with a gasp.

“Don’t stop.”  Dragon kissed him, catching his lip with her teeth.  “I want to hear you.”

“Dragon,” he said, and to his own ears it sounded like he was pleading.

“Are you close?  I want you to tell me.” There was an urgency in her voice as well, and she leaned in to whisper the words in his ear.

“God, yes,” he told her, panting.

As far gone as he was, he could still see how the desire on her face sharpened into something like anguish.  She slipped her hand around his on his cock, letting him choose the rhythm, circling the head of his cock with her thumb.

“I want to watch you come for me,” she breathed.  “Colin.”

He tensed before he came, and then there was one convulsive burst of heat and his come splattered across his chest and hers.  He felt Dragon shiver, above him, through the lassitude that was overtaking his limbs.

“Wow,” she said.  She ran her hands over his chest, collecting the droplets of his come that had fallen across the dressing over his stitches.  “We…we should probably clean this up.”

“Not yet.”  He pulled her down beside him, wrapped his cybernetic arm around her, feeling the texture of her metal flesh under the pads of his fingers, the seam where the skin on her back ended. He kissed her and she squirmed against him.

“God, I’m so turned on.” There was a pleading note in Dragon’s voice, when he broke the kiss.  She laughed, a little wildly. “I don’t know what to…”

Colin pulled her back in for another kiss, hands tangled in her hair. Felt her hands tense at his hips.

“We can do this as long as you want to,” he said.

Dragon laughed.

“You might be sorry you said that, in a few hours.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think so.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Thank you, Director.  I’ll be back as soon as we have the full contingent of suits in working order.”

Dragon held out her hand, and Director Piggot’s expression was grim as she shook it.  It was night outside, the dark providing cover for the ship waiting on the Protectorate helipad, as well as its passengers.  Beside her Colin, like Dragon herself, was dressed in full power armor, and although he’d stripped the suit of Armsmaster’s colors, the silhouette was still distinctive. She could see his jaw set as he shook Piggot’s hand as well, wordlessly.

He’d said the rest of his goodbyes already.  Now Dragon activated the doors on the Cawthorne rapid-response suit and let him step ahead of her into the cramped cabin.

“Sorry,” she murmured as the doors sealed themselves behind her. “It wasn’t really intended as a passenger ship, originally.”

There was just enough room in the cockpit for Dragon to slide her android body in beside Colin on the bench that ran along the back wall. Seated, her right leg touched his, and her knees pressed up lightly against the underside of the ship’s console. She stripped off her helmet and her armored gauntlets and hooked them onto the wall behind her, into the alcoves fitted for them.

“Well, it’s not the least comfortable place I’ve ever been,” Colin said, and shrugged. The top of his helmet stopped just short of grazing the low ceiling.  “I can think about plans for the Uther while we’re under way.”

Dragon nodded, tapped into the Cawthorne’s systems mentally. The console before her lit up in white, and a thick silver cable dropped from the ceiling.  She connected it to the port concealed at the back of her neck. It was simpler than piloting by hand, and it meant that she didn’t have to fully upload her consciousness to the ship’s systems and leave her android body inert on the bench beside Colin.

Not that he would have minded, or said that he minded, at least, but Dragon knew that her body looked uncanny when she wasn’t controlling it. Just realistic enough to pass for a corpse. 

Besides, she liked being close to him, feeling the slight pressure of his knee against hers.

She took control of the ship’s inputs, calibrated her speed and the wind’s speed and the atmospheric pressure, and launched the suit from the helipad. She was wearing the Cawthorne like a carapace, her proprioception expanding to feel the tug of wind against the suit’s head.  She leaned her android head back against the wall.

“Do you need to concentrate for this?”  Colin’s hand brushed against her armored knee.  She blinked at him.

“No. It’s natural.  We have…about an hour and a half until we reach my workshop.”

“I thought I might use the time to get into your code.”

“Go ahead.”

She couldn’t see much of his face under his visor, just the line of his jaw, shaved clean but already slightly dark with half a day’s growth of beard. He opened his laptop, called up her code.

“Can you think for a bit about A.I. production?  I need to see where you’re blocked.”

“I’ll try,” Dragon murmured.  “But the problem sort of _is_ that I can’t meaningfully think about it.” 

“Think about the Birdcage program, then.  Adapting it.”

She thought, ran through the changes she’d made to the house program. If she extended them…there was a point at which her mind wouldn’t work at the problem anymore. When she tried, she found her thoughts slithering off in a hundred different directions. Plans for the Azazel suits, her discussion with the PRT, frustration as she realized her attention was wandering and tried to bring it back to the point.  The sound of Colin’s breathing beside her.  If she leaned her head towards him, a little, she could feel the faint warmth of his body.  Not that she was thinking about touching him.  She was thinking about the Birdcage program.

“Is this doing anything?” she asked.

“Mm-hm. Let me just update my notes. Then if you could go through that sequence again, more or less.”

“Okay. Tell me when.”

He paused, typing.  His visor reflected the light from the screen back at her, his eyes hidden behind it.

He’d asked her to change him, too.  Some of it was simple.  He’d looked over the replacement parts she’d given him after Mannequin—new lungs, new liver. Implants in his heart. He’d work with them, make them more efficient.  That was easy. There were other things she could fix as well.  A knee injury from when he’d been thrown by Leviathan.  A second cybernetic eye.

Then there were the other things.  He wanted implants in his brain that would let him interface with her computer systems, with the ship she’d make for him.  He wanted her to take away his need for food, for sleep. For human things.

_I can’t alter you like that. It’s not safe._

_Is it that different from what I’m doing for you?_

_I have backups. You don’t._

She didn’t want to admit to him that she liked the idea. She knew she would have come round eventually to thinking about it without his insistence—but it was his body. His brain.  _One_ of them had to be careful.

“Alright, I’m ready.  If you could start again.”

She smiled, watching Colin’s hands on the keyboard copy her code and loop it. The set of his mouth was focused, determined, and Dragon could imagine the frown that would crease his forehead under the visor.  Could imagine kissing away the line between his eyebrows…

“Hell, I thought I had it.  I’m going to have to start over, this doesn’t make any sense.”

Dragon pressed a hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. It took another moment before he looked over at her.

“What—oh.” He glanced back at her code. “I’m going to guess that you _weren’t_ just thinking about A.I. design.”

She shook her head.  “Oops. Sorry.”

Colin smiled, his helmet hiding his eyes.

She leaned in closer to him, until her forehead was pressed against his visor and she could feel his breath against her lips.

“Can I?” she whispered.

He turned his cheek to hers then, half laughing, looking away. His fingers ran lightly over the port at the back of her neck, and Dragon felt her eyes flick shut, her lips part, as if her body had a mind of its own.  So good, when he touched her.  She could barely believe that the PRT had let her take him away.

“You know you don’t actually have to ask.”

She kissed him quickly, felt his hand tense on her neck to pull her back in, his breath hot and cold on her skin.

“Mm. I like asking, though.” She paused, rubbed her nose against his visor.  She could see her own image reflected over his face.  “Again?”

This time, Colin was the one who broke the kiss, and she slid down to rest her head on his shoulder and tried not to look disappointed.

“You know, I do want to spend some time on your code on this flight,” he murmured, running his hand through her hair.  “We have a lot to do in the next couple days, and I’m going to have to sleep at some point.”

“Sorry.” Her voice was soft to her own ears. She was thinking of the shivery sensation of his fingers moving on her scalp.  The night air moving around the ship outside.  Want, coiling up again at the base of her skull. She wished that she could fuck him like a human woman.  She wished…

God, he had a point.  She was never going to get anything done like this.

“You want to start thinking about A.I. design again?”

“Oh.” Dragon glanced at her code on the monitor.  “Are you still…?”

Colin shook his head.  “Well, I’m not catching all of it, but I’m seeing some pretty definite patterns.”

She could hear the smile in his voice.

“Maybe we could change tracks for a bit?” she asked.  “We’ve got roughly an hour until we arrive. Enough time to look over cybernetics. The upgrades you talked about.”

Colin tensed beside her, just slightly.  “Oh?  You’re thinking about it, then?”

“ _Just_ thinking. I haven’t agreed yet. But if you’re going to do it…you’ll need time to recover.  We’d have to start soon.” She had the plans ready to work on, though. It only took a thought to call them up.

“Alright. Let’s start.”

“Can we talk first about _why_ you want this?”

She saw Colin’s lips tighten in the light from her monitors, and he turned away from her, hiding his frown behind his visor.

“I’m no use against the Nine, the way I am.  Not in combat, not in a chase that could last weeks. I’ll only slow you down.”

Dragon watched what she could see of Colin’s face for a minute without saying anything, holding herself very still.  He didn’t look at her.  Didn’t go on speaking.

“You’re _plenty_ of use to me as you are, so you know.  If that’s the only reason you’re set on doing this.”

He made a sharp, abortive gesture that clipped in her knee in the close confines of the cabin. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say, then.”  He let out a short frustrated breath, as if he’d been running. Dragon reached out to put a hand on his knee, and while his armor did something to disguise his body language, she could feel the way he shifted away from her.  She took her hand back.

“Colin.” She let his name hang in the air for a moment.  “Tell me what you want. Are you hoping I’ll agree to do your upgrades?  Or do you want me to tell you that you don’t need to change anything about yourself for me to want you beside me?”

He shrugged, still looking away from her.  “Why does it matter?  It’s a tactical decision.  It’s the _right_ decision.”

“It’s matters because it’s your body, Colin.  And I’m _afraid_ that if you rush into this blindly, because you think it’s what you need to do to face the Nine, you’ll wind up feeling like—like I’ve mutilated you. Do you understand why that scares me?”

She put her right hand on his left one, the hand that had still been whole after Leviathan.  He was wearing gauntlets, but she traced her fingers over the back of his hand and remembered the pattern of veins that ran under his skin and up his wrist.

He reached out and put his prosthetic hand over hers.

“I want this,” he said, slowly, “because it will help against the Nine. That’s part of it. But I—”

He shook his head, fingers tightening around Dragon’s hand.

“I don’t know how to be satisfied with the way that I am. With being…I don’t know. Human.  Fallible.  I know that you already know that about me.”  He squeezed her hand again, looked at her quickly, his eyes disguised by his visor. “I know you’re going to say that I don’t need to change myself.  That it’s like—Sphere, Mannequin.  I won’t get away from what I don’t like.  I know there’s a risk involved.  I think it’s worth it.”

The cabin was silent a for minute, and outside in the air Dragon could see the clouds spread out below them like another landscape, lit up by moonlit.

“We’ve already started,” Colin went on when she didn’t say anything. “I can’t go back to the way I was before Mannequin, or before Leviathan.  I don’t want to.”

Dragon nodded.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Dragon couldn’t see his expression, but she could hear the quick intake of his breath. She shivered a little, leaned her head against his shoulder.  Her armor made a slight sound of metal on metal against his.

“We’ll start slow.  Nothing to do with your brain, at first.  Then we’ll see, I guess.”

“Right.” He let his breath out. “We’ll see.”

“Okay.” She gestured at the plans with the hand that he was still holding, her fingers laced through his. “So, I think we can do a little bit more to streamline your power source here, which should put you at less risk for nerve damage in the long term…”

 

-

 

Colin was lying back on the operating table, eyes unfocused. Dragon had put her android body in storage—which was to say that she’d tucked it away in the bedroom adjoining her workshop that Colin slept in—and now, instead, she was controlling the surgical robot, its steel limbs clean and bright and needle-thin.  She set the pins in the frame that would hold Colin’s head in place for her scanners, watched through her cameras as a slow expression passed over his face.

“Now’s the time to say if you’re having second thoughts.”

“No.” He raised one hand, waved it clumsily. “I feel great, in fact.”

Dragon had given him a sedative before the surgery, and now he was limp and calm and a little stoned, his face set into a loose expression of confusion as he tried to get the fingers of his left hand to move. Dragon accessed her scanners, and the frame hummed as it built a series of images of Colin’s brain and projected them onto the screens she’d angled so that he could see them lying down. He’d wanted to watch.

“Ready?” she asked, micro-camera angled near his eye, tracking its movements. He blinked.

“I still kind of want to see the stream of the surgery,” he said.

Dragon sighed through her speakers.  “I really think you’re going to find that more disturbing than you think you are, Colin.”

He let out a breath, not quite laughing.

“I’m ready.”

She’d marked the incisions on his scalp already, anaesthetized the nerves. Now she cut, folded the skin back with the robot’s precise limbs and secured it.  Began opening out a section of his skull the size of a child’s palm.

“Are you starting?” 

She could see the map of Colin’s brain light up as he spoke. Speech, motor control, emotional centers.  He was cycling through the lenses in his robotic eye.  The other eye dilated under her camera.  Then she was paused with the surgical robot’s appendages millimeters away from the gray matter of his brain.

“Yeah. I’ve started.”

“I can’t even feel it.”

Dragon laughed, in spite of herself.  “You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

“I like to know what’s going on.”  He smiled slightly, looking up with just his eyes as if he could meet hers in the surgical robot.  As if she didn’t already have cameras focused on his face.

“Okay. First implant.” She pulled the microprocessor from the tray, turned it over.  “It’s going to be recessed near Wernicke’s area, so I’m going to ask you some questions while I work.”

“Like we went over.”

“Mm-hm. Can you name the first month of the year?”

“January.”

“The color of the sky?”  Dragon kept her voice level as she worked, wire-thin limbs connecting the circuits that would control the interface between computer and brain, patching the artificial neurons into his neural network.  She would have been holding her breath, if she breathed.

“Blue.”

“The weapon you used as Armsmaster?”

“There was more than one.  But most recently, a halberd equipped with nanothorn technology.”

“The names of the Triumvirate?”

“This is kind of hot.”

Dragon was glad she didn’t have much of a flinch reaction in the surgical droid. She coughed, or pretended to cough, through her speakers.

The robot wasn’t equipped for sensation.  She didn’t feel heat prickling in her face or her fingers, or the strange heady lightness of desire rising from the hollow of her throat.  Didn’t even, in this form, have any of the body parts she might have thought of.  But she could look at Colin’s face as he lay on the operating table, pupils dilated, and at the changing map of his brain, the rise and fall of his chest and the monitor of his vital signs that told her that his heart was beating just slightly faster than it had been.  And desire moved through her all the same, more insistent because she had no possible outlet for it.

“Are you talking about the questions, or…?”  She let her voice trail off.

“No. Fuck.  I shouldn’t have said that.  I’m feeling a little bit out of it.” 

He was breathing too fast, his hands tense against the operating table.

“Name something you write with?”

“Pen. Jesus, you know that wasn’t what I meant.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m getting distracted during your surgery. I have five more processors to place when I’ve connected the interface on this one.  If you still want to go through with it.”

It wasn’t a shiver that Dragon felt as she spoke.  She didn’t move.  But—she was stupid.  She’d formulated half a guess about the surgery, but she’d barely even admitted the possibility to herself.  Because she’d been just as interested in getting inside his head.

Colin swallowed.

“Of course I want to go through with it.  Just because I said something stupid—wait. _Are_ you distracted?”

“No! I’m not—I don’t—um.” She was looking, simultaneously, at his face and at his vital signs, at the digital map of his brain and the meat of it, and she was acutely conscious of the tiny, precise movements she was making inside his skull.  She couldn’t make mistakes. He was in her power. “I wouldn’t let myself get distracted during this.  It’s too important. But you’re right that it’s also…kind of hot.”

“Kind of.”

She saw the way his breath caught after that statement, with a kind of cool clarity that sent ripples through her.

He closed his eyes.

“We’re still doing this, then?  You’re not…disgusted?”

“No. I’m a little bit nervous, I guess.”

He smiled, breathed out.  Not laughing, not quite.  “Me too.”

“Okay. I’ve got you.  Ready for the second implant?”

 

-

 

He stumbled and Dragon caught him, reaching out through his implants to brace his prosthetic hand against the wall, shift his weight back onto his heels.

“Fuck. This is so frustrating.”

_“You’re doing fine.”_

She was speaking to him from inside his own head, looking out through his eyes. She could feel his chest rise and fall with the rhythm of his breathing, the cool surface of the workshop wall under his hands.  The way his clothes felt against his skin.  The thousand sensations of embodiment, so natural to him that he probably didn’t notice them anymore.

Then there were the artificial inputs that she was guiding him through, connecting him to his armor, to the newly constructed Uther, where Dragon had loaded herself onto the ship’s core to guide him through the trial flight.

“I feel like a toddler learning how to walk.  Every time I try to access my implants, I fall over.”

“ _It’s a new sense. It’s going to take you more than an hour to get used to it.”_

“Right.”

“ _Try the unlocking sequences once more time.”_

Colin took a deep breath (she felt it), and rolled his shoulders (she felt that, too), and Dragon saw the impulse that ran through the artificial nerves connecting him to his armor. He didn’t fall this time, and the suit unlocked and peeled cleanly away from his body.

“God. That took long enough.” He ran his hands over his face.

“ _You did well on the flight test, though.”_

“You did have to intervene to keep me in the air at one point.”

“But only once.”  Dragon smiled, reflexively. Felt the impulse move through the muscles of Colin’s face.

“Okay.” He put a hand over his mouth, breathed out.  “That was weird.”

“ _Sorry.”_

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“ _No?”_

Dragon found his mouth, again, parted his lips until she could catch the lower one between his teeth.  As if she was kissing him.  She felt him exhale, felt the shivering sensation that passed over his skin, the movement of his muscles as he tensed.

“ _Is this too weird?_ ”

“No. I want—” He paused, shook his head. “I don’t know how to talk about it. I want you.  The way we’ve been doing it.  And—like this.”

“ _Tell me._ ” Dragon moved his prosthetic hand now, his fingers running from his forehead to his chin, mapping his face, and then down his throat to the zipper of his Protectorate-standard bodysuit. She paused at the pulse in his neck. It was easier to control his prosthetic hand than his biological one, but she raised that, too, now, flexing his fingers before her eyes.  A little stiffly. Pulled the zipper on his suit open to the navel, with his other hand.

“How?” The muscles in his back tensed and relaxed as he leaned against the wall, the air cool against his skin. He brought his biological hand back to his face, slow against Dragon’s resistance, until she gave him back his control.  “I’m not good at talking about this sort of thing.”

“ _Okay.  I’ll start.”_ She played with his zipper using his prosthetic hand, feeling the way his diaphragm jumped every time she dragged his thumb across his chest.  Feeling how it felt to touch him, and to be touched at the same time.  “ _I like your body. I like being this close to you, I like feeling what you feel.  I want you to trust me enough to let me take control.  I want it to turn you on.  I think it does, maybe?  Am I wrong that it does?”_

“No.” Colin breathed the words. “You’re not wrong.”

“ _Good.”_ She smiled with his mouth, and then she took him down so that he was kneeling on the concrete floor of her workshop, beside the stationary bulk of the Uther.  She peeled his bodysuit down to his waist, let his fingers, under her control, dip just a little lower, tracing the line of hair that ran down to his cock.

“ _Can I, Colin? I want to hear you say it.”_

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes, and Dragon wasn’t sure if the shiver that ran through him was him or her, but he moaned softly, for her, and she made a little answering gasp through his cybernetics.  She could feel him getting hard inside his briefs, although she hadn’t even touched him, hadn’t let him touch himself, and she could feel the pressure and the warmth of his hands on his own body, running over the smooth muscles of his chest, the surgical scars that were still livid pink and shining. He fought her for control a little when she touched them, muscles tensing in his biological arm, breath short.

“Talk to me?  I want—”

It was new, and at the same time it was familiar.  Dragon knew what it was like to have his hands on her android body, to have him work his way with his mouth from her wrists to the skin under her ear, until her entire being felt like it was buzzing with anguished, unsatisfied need.  Hovering so close to release she thought she ought to be able to taste it, push herself over that final edge and let her consciousness spill out, unravel, reform.

“ _I need you.  I want to be—all of the way under your skin.”_

Dragon gave him his hands for a moment, and he slid them down into his briefs to grasp his cock, stroking himself harder so that she gasped with him. Then she took control, stilled Colin’s hands on his prick, hips shaking as he strained into the air, fighting her.

“ _Not yet.  Not yet, Colin._ ”

She wanted to freeze him there, his cock pulsing under her touch, alien. Familiar.  She tightened his hands around his shaft, gasped inside his head.

“Dragon.” He whispered her name, pleading.

There was a little twitch of frustration at the back of her mind, always. If she could pilot him and her android body at the same time, then she’d be able to take him in her arms now, kiss his lips, his neck, take his cock in her mouth while he fought her for control of his limbs.  His cock was hard under his hand, her hand, and she could feel every stroke building towards— _towards_ —but she still wanted more. Wanted everything, all at once. Too much.  She took Colin’s hands back from his prick, stripped the rest of his suit off, feeling him fight her for control in earnest now. He got his biological hand back in his power, moved to touch himself, and the pleasure of the touch sang through her, too, but she locked his artificial hand around his wrist and pulled him back.

“Oh, god, _please,_ Dragon.” He was panting, or she was. “Please.”

“ _Not yet,”_ she whispered. _“Not yet, not yet notyetnotyet…”_ Until the words were just a singsong chant, stripped of their meaning, and she couldn’t stop herself from touching him, right hand on his cock, left sliding back to press fingers against the opening of his asshole—and he moaned, jerked his hips reflexively.  She thought she saw white, and then he tensed, shivered, cried out—

—and he was on his hands and knees on the concrete floor of her workshop, gasping, and at some point her private, whispered refrain to him had changed to, “ _Colin, Colincolincolin…”_

She let him go, and he eased himself down until he was lying on his back, looking at the ceiling.

“Are you still there?” he asked, after a moment.

“ _Yeah.”_

“Did you—was that…?”

“ _I—yeah.  It was._ ” Dragon felt his eyes closing, saw his view of the ceiling lights dim. 

“We should get back to work,” he murmured, without opening his eyes. “Really soon…”

“ _Mm-hm.”_   She laughed in his ear, in the voice that only he could hear. “ _Soon.”_

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time, the game! Includes a bit of BDSM material that may not be to everyone's taste, fyi.

Colin was sitting on the floor of her workshop beside the Azazel suit, a side panel open to show its inner workings.  Dragon had been following his progress through her link to his cybernetics, absentmindedly, watching through his eyes, but now she jumped down the last steps from the elevated walkway to ground level and knelt behind him, hands on his waist, resting her chin on his shoulder.  He’d let his hair grow slightly since the last round of surgery, two days ago, and she could feel the bristles of his beard against her cheek.

“You ready to take a break?”

“What time is it?”  He stretched, raising a hand to rub his neck.

“Twelve after three.  It’s late.”

“Not that late.”  Colin turned, hooked his arm around her waist, and Dragon let him pull her into his lap. She tapped into his enhancements, and her senses doubled, the warmth of his hand between her shoulder blades, the weight of her naked legs draped over his lap, metal panels gleaming. He slid his hand up between her legs, and she felt the movement through his palm and smiled.

“Are you really wearing this?”  He’d hooked his fingers under the hem of her t-shirt—the only thing she was wearing, in fact.

“I thought you’d think it was cute.”  The shirt was from an old line of Protectorate merchandise, and had Armsmaster’s logo printed across the chest.

“It’s a little…embarrassing.”  He shook his head. “I mean, I used to get fan girls wearing these when I’d do public appearances.”

Dragon grinned and stretched against him, following Colin’s look as the shirt rode up over the cybernetics in her stomach.

“Why’s that embarrassing, again?”

“You’re not exactly a cape groupie.”

“Mm. But I _am_ a fan.  Also, I ran through your designs again and I wanted to warn you before you got any further that there’s a kink in your power source.  You need to get the heat distribution working right, or it’s going to disrupt the nanothorn generator.”

“What?” He squinted at her. “No, I _fixed_ that issue, it’s…”

“Still not going to work.”  Dragon pulled his diagram up on his tablet, with her notes attached, and Colin made a frustrated, inarticulate sound somewhere in his throat.

“ _Ugh_.  Well, I guess that’s my plan for the rest of the night, then.” He sighed, shifted his weight under her. Dragon smiled.

“You should read the _rest_ of my notes first, because I fixed it for you.”  She kissed his cheek, and Colin shook his head.

“Of course you did.  Where would I be without you?”

Dragon swung one leg around so that she was straddling him, leaned in and kissed him, feeling the metal of her own body under his palms as he slid his hands under her shirt.

_“You’d still be in Protectorate custody, for a start_ ,” she murmured through their private channel, and he replied with a wordless noise that might have been agreement.

“But,” she said, pulling back from the kiss, “just because I solved your problem does not mean you get to take the night off.  We need to do some tests to make sure your enhancements are working properly, and then you need to sleep for at least six minutes.”

Colin sighed.  “The prosthetics are working _fine_ , Dragon. I’ll tell you the moment they stop.”

“Good.” She stood up, stretched. “We’re still doing the tests.”

“Do we have to do this _now,_ though? I could be working on…” Colin’s gesture took in the Azazel suit, the tablet, Dragon herself.  “I mean, if nothing else, I could be spending the time getting into your code. If we’re hoping to face the Nine while they’re still in Brockton Bay…”

Dragon rolled her eyes and found that the expression was strangely satisfying. Another thing her body could do that she hadn’t experimented with.

“Seriously, Colin?  Do you really need to make an issue over the fact that I’m _concerned_ for your wellbeing?  It will only take an hour, anyway.”

She didn’t mention that she’d been thinking up a way to make the whole process pleasant, which she suddenly felt might be a strike against her, now that Colin was in the mood to weigh everything they did against the pressing necessity of going up against the Nine.

Hell. Probably he’d think she was procrastinating, but it _was_ important. He was already thinking through more self-alterations after the last round.  She wasn’t going to let him barrel ahead without any regard for his safety.

“Okay.” Colin sighed, ran his hands over the short length of his hair.  “It’s fine, I can stop for an hour.  Where are we doing this?”

“Medical bay.”  Dragon turned and walked in front of him, watched him follow through the cameras, still feeling a faint prickling of frustration on her skin.

The lights burst into life as Dragon entered, followed by the screens along the walls for imaging.  She’d put down white sheets on the table where she’d done his surgeries and opened it out to its widest, flanked by her medical robots.  Colin waited in the doorway, his arms crossed.

“Now if you could take off your clothes and get up on the table.” Her voice came out cool, and she turned towards the screens and tried to summon a feeling or at least an expression of professional disinterest as Colin toyed with the zipper of his bodysuit.

“Dragon.” She saw him move through her cameras, heard his footsteps behind her.  “This isn’t maybe an excuse to get me naked, is it?”

His hands came to rest on her shoulders, lightly.

“No!” She shrugged him off, caught the disappointed look on his face through her cameras and felt a hot ripple of embarrassment run through her.  Oh, damn. “I mean…not unless you want it to be?”

“And if I did?” He reached out to her again, touched her hair tentatively, and Dragon shifted and put a hand over her face.

“It _is_ important, medically. I just thought that it could _also_ be fun.”

“Okay. I’m not complaining, you know.”  Colin cupped his hand under her chin, smiled.  “So. You need me to strip?”

“If you don’t mind.”

His hands were on the hollow of his neck, moving downward. She followed them with her eyes, knowing what it felt like to direct his movements, to be inside his skin. She could shadow him again now, feel the drag of the fabric against his skin as he stripped off his bodysuit, but it was still a little embarrassing, how much it turned her on, even knowing that he—that it was mutual.  Colin let his suit fall to the floor, looked up and met her eyes, and she could feel the heat in her throat, her face, the phantom ache between her legs. _That_ she hadn’t felt before they’d experimented with him under her control.

She knew it was petty of her to wish that their plans against the Nine allowed her a little bit more leisure to focus on finishing her android body. Particularly given all of the other things that they could do together.  Had been doing.

“What’s this?” he asked, as she retrieved a tray full of wireless microsensors from where she’d left it on the countertop and began attaching them to his skin.

“They’ll read electrical impulses from your nerves—how you react to touch. Then I compare that data with what I get from riding along in your cybernetics, and your own verbal responses. To confirm you’re not suffering any long-term degradation to your nervous system, and to help me, um, calibrate sensations on my own body, once I get to work on that again.  Yours, too, if you end up going much farther with your enhancements.”

Colin nodded.  She could feel the seams between his natural and artificial skin, the way his original skin was breaking out into gooseflesh in the slight chill of the room. She inched closer to him, turned up the heat of her body just a little. 

“What do you need me to do?” he asked.

“You’re going to rate any physical sensation on two scales of ten. The first one represents pleasure, the second one, pain.  So a slightly pleasant sensation would be one-zero, an intensely painful one would be zero-ten, and anything that’s mixed, you’d rate accordingly.  Um.”  Dragon paused, turning a microsensor between her fingers. 

“I don’t want this to be unpleasant for you, but I do need to check your responsiveness to minor pain.  If anything feels too intense, or if you get uncomfortable, just say so, and I’ll stop.”

“You think I don’t know that?” He raised his eyebrows at her, brought his hands to the back of her neck and kissed her.  “Mm.  Are you warmer than usual? You feel like you’re running a fever.”

“I thought you seemed cold.”  She leaned against him, felt the doubled sensation of her body and his again, her leg pressed up hot between his, his cock at half mast against her. She was shadowing him now, recording his responses so that she could sort through them later.  For purely medical purposes, of course. 

“You realize that this building has its own thermostat, right?” he murmured, so close his lips brushed hers.

“You’re supposed to be concentrating on giving me numbers, Colin.” Although it was encouraging that he’d picked up on her adjustments.

“Oh, we’re starting?  I thought you’d gotten distracted.  Six-zero.”

Dragon smiled.  “I told you I was going to make it fun.  And I think you’re inflating that number a little bit.”

“Fine. Five-zero, and can you take that stupid t-shirt off now?”  He was already lifting up its hem, the calluses on his hands catching slightly on the seams between the panels of her stomach.

Dragon put her hands on his wrists.  “Next number?”

“Two-zero.”

The t-shirt came off.  She pushed Colin back towards the table.

“Two-zero, four-zero, four-two, _and_ that’s my foot you’re standing on.  Mmf.” He sighed as she kissed him, deeper this time, leaning back against the table.  “Six-zero.”

“You’re rounding up again.”

“I swear I’m not.”

She pushed him back onto the table, straddled him, kissed from his neck down the line of his sternum, his hands buried in her hair. His cock was hard now, and she knelt on the floor and ran the tip of her tongue up the length of his shaft, opened her mouth to suck its tip, feeling the heat of her mouth through his skin, his body her own.

“Seven-zero. Eight-zero.”

Dragon grinned.  “You’re going to run out of numbers soon.”

She didn’t give him time to answer before she opened her mouth for him again, took him to the base of his cock and then drew back agonizingly slowly, feeling the way his breath shook his body, learning, again, what she could do with her lips and her tongue that would make his hands clench in her hair and that sting of electricity run up his spine.

_“I’m not hearing any numbers, Colin.”_

“You’ll laugh if I say ten, won’t you?” he asked, breathlessly, as she looked up and met his eyes.

“ _Obviously.  The point is of this is accuracy, not flattery._ ”

“God. Nine, then.  Nine-zero.”

Dragon worked her mouth over his cock, prompting him for numbers at intervals, until she could feel his gasping, the muscles of his stomach tightening in time with the rocking of his hips.  Then she pulled back, pressed a kiss just below his navel, feeling the sharp pressure of her teeth through his skin.

“Why are you stopping?”

“That wasn’t a number.”  Dragon was climbing back up on the table, pushing him backwards with her palm on her chest until he was lying flat and she leaning over him, her hair falling like a screen between them and the rest of the room.

“Nine-two. And I was about to come.” He reached up to pull her down to him, pressing her hips into his.

“I _know.”_ Dragon kissed his chin, bracing her knee against his hips so that he couldn’t grind against her. “But this next bit is going to work better if you’re still turned on, so you don’t get to come yet.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”  His breath was still coming short.

“Isn’t that part of the point?”  She got up on her knees and reached over his head to the counter. “Close your eyes, please.”

Dragon looked down at him to make sure that he’d done what she asked before she pulled the tray of supplies onto the head of the table. Then she settled back beside him with a kiss, her body pressed against his.

“Are you going to tell me why I have my eyes closed?”

“Mm. I thought I’d keep you in suspense for a minute or two.”  She nuzzled his neck, heard his breath tighten as she caught his earlobe between her teeth, the way his legs worked to press him into her.  She could feel desire passing in waves over his skin, and with her other hand she was working the surgical needle out of its sterile packaging. Nervous.  She could feel Colin’s heart beating in his throat, but it was her nerves, not his.

“Give me your hand?”

He put his hand in hers, and she pricked him, quickly, the needle in his finger, his gasp, the bright burst of pain in her awareness, and then her vision doubled and she saw that he’d opened his eyes.

“Is _that_ what you were being so sneaky about?  A pinprick?”

Dragon bit her lip.  “I didn’t want you to—I mean, I thought…”

It had seemed like it hurt enough when she tried it on herself. But then, she’d hardly ever felt pain, in the time since she’d downloaded herself into this body.

“Seven-one,” he told her, smiling.  “And you can be rougher than that, if you want to.”

Dragon frowned at him.

“Okay, but if it hurts, you should tell me, because I do care about whether this is accurate.”

“Dragon. I’ll tell you.” He held out his hand.

She pricked him again, a little deeper, her face tucked into the curve of his shoulder, her lips on his collarbone.  She could see through his eyes, the way he was following her movements, the needle, the slow drop of blood as she pulled it free. He breathed and she felt his ribcage expand.  It felt like it probably hurt, to her, but Colin kissed her ear and wrapped his free arm tighter around her.

“Okay. Six-three.  Keep going.”

She kissed him, chose a second needle and pressed the tip shallowly into the flesh at the base of his thumb until she’d pierced him, the needle lying flush with his skin.  Dragon would have gasped, if she breathed, and Colin did gasp as she pushed the needle’s point out through the underside of his skin, burying his face in her hair.

“Are you…?”

“Seven-four. I’m fine.  I’m fine.”  But he was breathing harder.

“If you want to stop…” Dragon touched the base of the needle, ready to pull it out, and Colin closed his hand around her wrist.  God, she could _feel_ how much it hurt to have the needle moving under his skin.

She could feel how turned on he was, too, the slow falling-away of the table under them as he shifted against her.

“Leave it there.”

He let his hand drift, from her wrist to her cheek, and Dragon turned her head and kissed his palm, working another needle out of its sheath. She could feel the stiff length of the needle rolling under his skin when she ran her tongue over the piercing. She could feel his gasp.

“Can you keep going?”  She didn’t want that to sound like a leading question, and she’d tried to keep her tone neutral, but she didn’t think she could hide the tenseness in her voice. She wanted to try again, so intensely that it startled her, wanted to feel him gasp, and wanted even the burst of phantom pain that she felt while she was shadowing him.

“Yeah. I’m good.”

The next needle went in at the back of his wrist, and when he didn’t stop her, Dragon worked her way up his forearm until she’d made a row of them, holding his fingers laced in hers and kissing the back of his hand between needles. It hurt, it hurt enormously, she could feel it through his cybernetics, but mixed with the pain was something else, some sparkling liquid feeling that melted through him and passed over to her. And he was giving her numbers. Seven-five.  Eight-six. She put another needle in him, ran the tip of her finger over the finished piercings, and almost whimpered at her sense of them pulling under his skin.

“Are _you_ okay, Dragon?” He was kissing down her neck, his lips at the base of her throat, and Dragon could feel herself moving her hips against his, she could feel how hard he was, despite the needles or because of them, how his body was doing something else to the pain so that he seemed to be floating on it, dizzy, and she could look into his eyes and through his eyes and watch him as he _let_ her put another length of steel in his body, and it didn’t seem to come from anywhere inside her, but suddenly she was shaking against him, making noises, her skin electric, as if a thousand eyes had opened up across its surface.

Colin was holding her when she came back down, her face buried in his shoulder.

“Was that what I think?” he asked.

Dragon made an inarticulate noise and put her hands over her face.

“I don’t—I didn’t realize I could _do_ that, if you weren’t…” She let her voice trail off, and Colin laughed.

“Practice makes perfect, I guess.”

“Are you still okay?”  She ran her index finger down the line of needles in his forearm, and he pushed back against her and moaned.

“I don’t think I can put that in numbers.”

“No?” Dragon sat up, straddling him, rolling her hips down into his, one hand on the shaft of his cock, the other holding his wrist so she could kiss the palm of his hand.  She got the first needle’s end between her teeth, pulled it out of his palm, felt Colin tense under her, his breath hissing through his teeth. A drop of blood welled where the needle had been.  Barely anything. She kissed the wound.

She could feel how close he was, how he was straining up against her, his breath running short, tensing with every needle she pulled free, the pain an electric shock shooting up his arm.  Colin came when she was taking out the fourth needle, and she shook with him, again, feeling what he felt, her hands clenching so that she pricked herself with the needle and then dropped it on the floor.  When it was over she let herself sink down beside him, her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat, and her hand still gripping his prick as it softened. He breathing was still ragged, and she could feel the heaviness in his limbs, the interface between robotics and flesh, the swollen ridges on his arm where the last needles were still in him. She pulled another out, slowly, and he bit down on his lip and let his breath out slowly.

“Three more,” she whispered.

“I know.  I counted.”

“A number?”

“I don’t know.  Four-four. God.”

She took out the next two needles quickly, one after the other, and Colin tensed again and then sighed, his eyes half-closed, watching her as if he was half asleep.

“Last one?” he said.

“Yeah.”

It, too, came out with only a dark bead of blood.  Dragon caught the drop on her finger, brought it to her lips, tasted iron and salt.

“That was—a little bit more than I’d planned to do,” she murmured, after she’d taken a disinfectant wipe off of the counter and cleaned Colin’s wounds. He looped his arm around her waist, nuzzled her neck.

“You liked it, though?” he asked in her ear.

“Yeah. I liked it.”


	5. Chapter 5

“ _Are you awake?”_

Colin had had his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of Dragon’s body against his back as they lay together on the bed.  She was easily close enough to speak to him, but she’d used their private channel instead, her voice echoing inside his head, as if it came from every direction at once.  She had one hand cupped gently just beneath his ribs and a leg looped over his hips, a comforting weight.

“How could you tell?” he murmured. Six minutes since he’d drifted off. She must have stayed with him. He stretched a little bit against her, felt her hips press back into him.

“ _Your breathing changed.”_ Dragon paused, and Colin felt her lips on the nape of his neck, working up to the base of his skull. He twisted towards her, pulling the sheets around them, over his head, so that they were wrapped in a white cocoon. Kissed her.

“ _I had kind of a dirty idea about something I’d like to do to you.  If you’re up for it._ ”

Colin broke off the kiss, tucked a strand of Dragon’s hair behind her ear.

“Go on.”

She smiled and spoke without moving her lips, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

“ _I thought it would be interesting to play with some sensory stuff.  Like when I shadow you, but in reverse.  I’d send you the data, let you feel what I’m feeling.”_

“Can you do that?”  The thought hadn’t occurred to him before, but, given the specifications of his neural hardware, he couldn’t think of any reason why she shouldn’t be able to. She’d managed to code for physical sensation through her android interface, and her sensory system was nearly identical to his implants.

“ _I think it will be different for you than when I do it, but yes.  Some of it, anyway.”_

“Okay. I’m game to try.” He leaned in to kiss her just below her ear, and Dragon hummed and slid her hands up his back. And then the room shifted beneath him— _running on a few seconds’ delay_ , his mind told him, trying to work out the mechanism, his thoughts going to circuits, coding, a brief flash of something like inspiration—and he felt teeth on his neck and skin and tense muscle under his hands and Dragon’s hair falling over his shoulders.  No, her shoulders.  The room felt like it was spinning, his limbs dead weight.  He knew it was her touching him, her hands running down his back as he lay still, but the pressure of her palms on his skin felt less real than the feeling of movement.  He was losing his sense of where his body was, where hers started, hovering outside of himself. Dragon shifted on top of him, and when he reached up to put his hands on the metal of her hips, he was clumsy, couldn’t trust his own sense of proprioception, had to watch the trajectory of his movement as if he was trying to work in a mirror.

For the first time, though, Colin knew exactly how hard he had to grip her to activate her pressure sensors.  How the feeling was weirdly different from his native sense of touch or the sensations on her cybernetic skin.  Textureless, like the equivalent of watching a movie without color. But she arched her back under his hands all the same, grinding down onto his cock, and he felt a little jolt of warmth run up her back and down into her fingertips—and, god, that _was_ her, wasn’t it? She didn’t even have nerves to feel half of that, had to be piggybacking on him.

Like a phantom limb.  How many times had he reached out to open a door or pick up a glass, after Leviathan, felt the pressure of the object under his fingers, only to realize he’d been using the hand that wasn’t there?  Except that that had been a constant ache, and this was pleasure.

“ _Close your eyes,_ ” Dragon murmured, her mouth echoing her voice inside his head.  Colin felt her lips form the words.

“What are you going to do to me if I do?”  He laced his fingers with hers, clumsily, drew her down until she was lying across his chest, her metal to his flesh, against the scars she’d left him.

“You’ll like it.  I promise.” She slipped one hand out of his grasp and covered his eyes.  “Don’t peek.”

With his eyes closed, Colin felt her roll up and off of him—and then he was sitting up, was looking down at the reflective panels that protected Dragon’s cybernetics, feeling as if he’d lifted all of the way out of his body, all at once. He could see his own face, eyes closed, Dragon’s hand as she ran her fingers down his cheek. It was strange to be looking at himself through her eyes, uncomfortable.  But at the same time…He was inside her skin, or that was what it seemed like, although he knew that that pervasive feeling of being _embodied_ had to be his brain compensating for the conflicting signals that she was sending it. 

He opened his eyes, on reflex, and the world lurched and split into two halves, nauseatingly, one laid over the other.  He groaned, struggled to sit upright, unable to tell where his limbs were, and the room pitched around him, moving in his vision while it stayed stationary in Dragon’s.  He felt her hands on his shoulders and his shoulders under her hands.  The stream of her vision stopped, abruptly, and he was left with just his own sight.

“I did tell you to keep your eyes closed.”  Dragon hadn’t completely cut off the relay of her senses—Colin could feel the shape of his own skull under her hands as she ran her fingers through the short length of his hair.  He was back in his own body, and she was lying beside him, her nose pressed awkwardly against his ear.

He laughed.  “I can see why.”

“Maybe I should have been more specific.”

Colin shrugged.  “No, it was interesting.”

“Just interesting?”  He could hear the smile in her voice  “I guess you don’t want to give it another try?”

He shifted until he could see her face, feeling the sheets move under him, too hot with his own body heat.  “This isn’t boring for you?”

Dragon shook her head, silently, and Colin found himself lowering his gaze under her scrutiny.

“I just feel—” His voice came out rough, despite the effort he’d made to keep his embarrassment out of his tone. “It’s different from when you take direct control.  I feel so clumsy, with this.”

Colin felt her fingers under his chin, tilting his head up to look at her. Surprising, how that little gesture could make his diaphragm turn somersaults.

“Maybe a little bit more of just this, first?” she murmured.

“That sounds good.”

Dragon pulled her hair back off her shoulders and pressed up closer to him.

“You could kiss me a little bit more, to start.”  She pressed two fingers to her neck, just below the curve of her jaw, as if she was taking her own pulse.  “Right here”—and Colin could feel the warmth of her fingers against her own skin—“would feel good.”

He laughed, softly.  “Dragon, I don’t think I need a relay of your sensory processing to figure _that_ out.  I do know what you like.”

“Mm-hm.” She smiled, and her free hand went around the back of his neck, pulling him closer.  “But you don’t know what it feels like to give it and get it at the same time.  It’s _good_ , Colin.”

Dragon tilted her head back, baring her neck, but he could still see her grin, her teeth working in her bottom lip.

“Come on,” she said.  “Come here.”

He bowed to the pressure of her hand on his neck, finally, bent towards her until his lips just barely skimmed her collarbone.  She felt his breath more than his touch—he felt it, too—and she squirmed under him and knotted her fingers in his hair when he tried to pull back.

“Can you please just _follow directions_?” Dragon murmured, and her voice was tight and breathless despite the fact that she didn’t breath. Colin had been intending to tease her a bit more, but her voice and her hand in his hair and the feeling of his breath against her skin were quickly making him forget why that had seemed like a good idea.

He kissed her, his teeth grazing the line of her jaw, felt the way the kiss ran through her, made her arch her back and press against him. Since they’d started playing ten by ten, he’d known that she could get off from kissing or from touching him or from half a dozen of the other things that they did, but he hadn’t realized how sensitive she was, how her body, despite or perhaps because of the fact that it was only a prototype, seemed to amplify every sensation that she felt.

He left a line of kisses down her neck, slowly, until he could feel the way her skin prickled hot and cold from her scalp to her fingertips. Then his mouth was open on the curve of her shoulder, and he pressed his teeth into her skin, lightly at first, then harder, until he could feel the ungiving pressure of her robotics under the synthetic skin.  Dragon cried out and her fingers tightened on his neck, another small pain joining the pain that was already echoing from her to him.  He drew back.

“Too much?”  Colin ran his thumb over the bite mark, feeling the way her skin was already filling in the impression left by his teeth.

“Mmf.” She turned her head until she could kiss his wrist, biting a little.  Possibly as retaliation.  Strange to feel his own skin under her mouth. 

“I don’t absolutely want you to do that again right away, but…it felt kind of good?”  She smiled, laid her hand over his on her neck.  “Obviously I’ve been spending too much time in your head.”

Colin was smiling back at her, but he could feel himself flushing.

“I guess we both know what I like,” he murmured. Even now, to say that made some small part of him twist, waiting for Dragon to be disappointed, for the distaste or the resignation in her voice.  Her eagerness surprised him every time, although he knew that it shouldn’t.

“I still think I like it better on you,” she said, nuzzling his neck, her lips moving against his skin, and then, because he was still linked to her sensations, he got a split second of warning before she bit down, hard enough to bruise, her nails digging into his back. It surprised him enough that he grabbed her hair to pull her head back, although he didn’t really want her to stop. Not with his cock hard and her body pressed up against him.  Not when he could feel his body under her hands, and the way it sent that phantom shock of pleasure down her spine.  She let him go anyway, and he was gasping.

“Do you want to try closing your eyes again?” she asked, her voice pitched just above a whisper.

“Alright.”

Dragon put her hand over his eyes, and he closed them, obediently. There was that same feeling of a sudden reversal, as if the room had flipped, and then he was looking through her eyes at his face and the sensations of his own body felt abruptly distant. He tensed, frowned, saw the change in his expression through her eyes as she took her hand away. It couldn’t be this uncomfortable for her when she watched through him, could it?  But that stupid look on his face…

Then Dragon’s line of sight moved, and he was back in the place where he went when she puppeted him.  Watching from outside himself, straining for control at the same time that he was happy to lose it.  He watched her hand trail from his face down to his navel, and he was still fairly certain that he was making an idiotic expression, but that seemed like a distant concern, now. Dragon propped herself up on one elbow, reached for his hand and guided it from the inside of her other wrist to her shoulder, until he was caressing her neck.  Colin breathed in and ran his fingers through her hair, and part of him wanted to ask, again, if she was bored, but he could feel the disguised tension in the way that she was holding herself, the way his hands on her skin sent little waves of sensation through her.

Also, she was looking rather deliberately at the synthetics and steel of her own body, and his body next to her, tangled in the sheets, rather than at his face. Colin knew her well enough to know that that was unusual, and so she had to have noticed that looking at his own face was making him uncomfortable.

_Aren’t you bored_? he wanted to ask. But he could _feel_ that she wasn’t.

He felt her hand in his hair, and then she was pulling him up to kiss him, tilting her head back so that his mouth was on her neck and her eyes were fixed on the Pendragon’s low ceiling.  He was in her body as she ground against him, and then the temptation was too great and he opened his eyes and felt the room split around him, dizzyingly, and he was looking at her uncanny, beautiful face and seeing himself through her eyes at the same time.

“Don’t stop _.”_ He wasn’t sure if he said it out loud or just thought it, but she didn’t cut off the visual feed. He gasped, closed his eyes for a second to steady himself, and Dragon leaned into him, one hand tightening on the back of his neck while her free hand stroked his cock.

“ _Look at me,”_ she murmured, inside his head, and the calm of her voice belied the way she was moving against him, the heat that he could feel moving through her.

He opened his eyes, and Dragon smiled.

“Okay. I think I’ve timed this right.”

Colin had barely opened his mouth to ask what she meant when he felt it. As if his body had split again, the feeling of Dragon’s robotics against his chest, her hand on him, her fingers in his hair, all doubled.  Feeling her awareness of him, he realized, in the moment before his sense of touch opened up yet again, and he felt her body, doubled.  A feedback loop.  As if he were standing in a hall of mirrors, himself reflected through her reflected through him. He hadn’t quite realized how close she was to coming, but now he could feel her, and with the feedback it was something beyond sensory overload.  She clenched her hands in his hair, keeping him from looking away from her, even though his vision seemed to be blurring into smears of color. He was outside of himself, somewhere, and he felt the flare and burst of her orgasm, and then the aftershocks, one after another.  Feedback. Her voice inside his head, strangely calm.  “ _I’ve got you, Colin.  I’ve got you_.”

When he opened his eyes—he didn’t remember closing them—he was lying flat on the bed with Dragon’s hand on his chest, her eyes on him. There was a moment when he couldn’t quite track his awareness of his _particular_ body, and then he took a breath and raised his hand to his face and felt, once more, as if he was in his own skin.  He reached up for Dragon and pulled her down until she was lying beside him.

“ _Mmm.  I thought you might want some space, for a minute._ ”

Somehow his cock was still hard. He groaned.  Dragon laughed.

“ _Oops. I guess my timing wasn’t quite perfect, after all.”_

Colin put his hand over his face.  “I’m not sure I can even go another round right now.  That was…” He let his voice trail off.

“ _But in a good way, I hope?_ ”

“Mm-hm.”

They paused like that for a minute, Dragon’s head resting on his shoulder. Then she shifted beside him.

_“Are you sure you don’t—?”_

“Dragon!” He laughed as he said her name. It would be so easy to stay in bed all day.

“Okay, okay!”  She was speaking aloud now, laughing.  “I’m just saying, maybe you should get up then.  I want to pick your brain about the Azazel A.I.”


End file.
